French Polished Murder (20 page)

He smiled at me and managed to look almost bashful. “Ah, it doesn’t matter. I’ll have it cleaned. He’s kind of cute all happy over ice cream.”

I was holding my cup—Rocky Mountain Road—and Cas’s cup of Daring Climber Cherry, a name that I thought was trying to sound regional but only managed to sound creepy. Still, I abstained from making jokes about it all the way over mountain roads, to one of the relatively larger foothills overlooking the entire city.

Cas drove us right up to a ledge—though not so near that we could fall over with an incautious move or an unexpected trembler—parked the car and shoved the parking break home. “My parents used to call this the top of the world,” he said, as he took the ice cream from me. “When we were being brats and everyone needed to get away for a bit, they’d get us burgers at one of the fast-food places and drive up here. They convinced us it was the greatest treat ever.”

“Us?”

“Nick stayed with my family a lot even then. His parents used to have a restaurant here in town, and they were trying to get it off the ground, so he would stay with us during the busiest times, usually the weekend. Then his parents realized they could do much better in Denver, so they sold and moved there, and he ended up living with us for our senior year. Though . . .” He grinned. “By that time, we were a little past being appeased by going to the top of the world.”

I smiled at him. “I should hope so.” Then, suddenly curious, as I looked out at the magnificent panorama of twinkling lights and the lighted ribbon of the highway in the distance. “Not even as a necking spot?”

“Are you trying to find out about my past love life, Ms. Dare?”

“Well?” A man like Cas couldn’t have been celibate or even single most of his life. I knew he had never been married but that his one high school girlfriend had left him for someone who was going into law school and not just law enforcement.

“Not here,” he said. “I mean, yeah, I had my share of girlfriends, though none particularly permanent, and my even higher share of one-date-type of things, but I didn’t bring them here. This place is special to me. It’s something, you know . . . I did with my family, which made me feel important and connected to them. Can’t answer for Nick, but I don’t think so. I used to joke if I ever got married, it would be up here, in a car, with the minister in the front seat.”

“How quaint,” I said, as I marked the
if I ever
, which seemed to be irrevocably in the past and in the negative.

“Isn’t it?” he asked, and leaned in and kissed me. “Of course, I’d need to find a woman crazy enough to agree to it.” He looked all dreamy. “We could bring burgers from Cy’s. Hell, I’d even pay for the minister’s.”

I cleared my throat. “Yeah, okay. So, what did you find out about Jacinth Jones.”

His playful mood vanished. He looked forward and stabbed viciously at his mound of ice cream with his little plastic spoon. “My colleague in Chicago found some stuff. Not, you know, criminal, but a couple of complaints Jones made about someone who was harassing him. He worked for some sort of accounting firm there, apparently that’s what he was actually trained for. Which, yeah, meant he came in contact with the mob now and then. Impossible not to, in Chicago, at the time. But my friend says that Jones himself seemed to be above board and squeaky clean, particularly when the times are taken into account. But . . . here’s the thing . . .”

“Yes?”

“You know at the time anything legal took race into account, right?”

“Uh . . .”

“Yeah. Well . . . Jones was registered in Chicago as Negro. He came, apparently, from New Orleans, where his mother was the mistress of some rich white guy, who was presumably his father.”

“The police records said this?” I asked.

“He did some work for his father’s firm, and it brushed on mob-connected liquor running, though of itself it seemed to be clean.”

“Uh,” I said. “The West must have been more integrated than I expected then, because none of the newspapers said anything about this race.”

He looked at me as though he were about to tell me something I didn’t like, “No, hon. I’m afraid the West wasn’t any more integrated, except where it ignored laws, but what it was was a land of opportunity, where any man was what he said he was.”

“Uh—”

“Jones clearly looked white enough to pass. Hell, his mother might have looked white enough to pass. Coming out West and dropping the racial classification from his description opened new horizons for him. He wouldn’t be the first, nor the last to do so. As far as I can tell, he worked in Chicago, as a bookkeeper, long enough to save enough money to start a business out here. He was smart enough, too, not to try some harebrained business like prospecting. I mean, there was so much more money in catering to the miners than in trying to be one.”

I looked at Cas, as I remembered what I had been reading before I left. My stomach felt cold and the ice cream fell into it like a hundred-pound weight. I set it atop the dashboard, and looked at Cas. “Cas, oh, this is so not good.”

“The ice cream? I’m sorry,” he said, suddenly solicitous. “Is it spoiled or something?”

I shook my head. “No, no. Not that. It’s . . . what you said. You see, Ben told me I could use his laptop, and I was looking through the Net for stuff. (No, I don’t have wireless access, but the upstairs neighbor lets Ben hook into his whenever he’s around, and I thought it didn’t matter if I did, too.) Anyway . . . when I was interrupted by prank phone calls, I was looking up Abihu Martin.”

“Yes?” Cas said. “The husband of the missing woman? Mayor of Goldport or something, wasn’t he?”

“Yeah. And he ran on the KKK ticket.”

Cas whistled under his breath. “Well, that would justify . . . uh . . . that would certainly justify her—and Jacinth, too—being afraid enough of him to take off without delay and without leaving a forwarding address. If she knew . . .”

“Yes, but . . .” I told him what the Martins had told me and the threats of murder with the ax. “I’d looked online, you know, and thought Martin was such a bloodless wasp that there was no possible way that he could have done something like that, but now I’m not so sure.”

Cas took a deep breath. “Dyce, I’m going to tell you again . . . Abihu Martin might have blighted their lives, made them run madly some place, leaving no trace behind. But he’s dead, and so are they. If people took it into our heads to punish everyone’s wrongdoing going back hundreds of years, I’d be in a fine mess. I can barely cope with the crimes happening now.”

I sighed. That was pretty much what I thought he would say. So I told him about the call I’d received. “Because Ben put an ad on an online list to give away the rats?” he asked.

“I presume,” I said.

He made a face. “Sounds like the kind of loony Nick is looking for all right.” He grabbed his phone from his pocket, and dialed. I started to ask what he was doing, but someone must have picked up, because he said, “Nick. Great. Is Ben—Right. Good. Did he bring his car or . . . I see. So, you’re bringing him back to Dyce’s, right?” He looked over at me and frowned slightly, though looking amused. “Two a.m.? I see. Well, there’s a message for you to listen to and you probably should see if we can’t trace it with the phone company. No, I can’t tell you exactly what it said, but it was in response to the ad about giving away the rats, and the caller seemed to have an odd pro-rat anti-domesticated pet thing going, so . . . Yeah. Okay. An hour or two then. Fine.” He hung up and turned to me. “They’re at Ben’s place, and they said they’ll be an hour or two, but he’ll come in when he drops Ben off, so that he can listen to the message, okay?”

I nodded. “Yeah,” I said, looking back. Fortunately E had consumed all of his ice cream and the cone before falling asleep, but I couldn’t swear the stains on his hands, face, and blanket would ever come off. “We should probably head back and put E to bed.”

Cas looked back. “Shouldn’t we wash him first?”

“What? And risk waking him up. My dear, you’re clearly not a parent!”

He opened his mouth, then nodded, and put the car in reverse, getting us slowly off the ledge. “For the record, Ms. Dare, when it comes to crazy women with unorthodox ideas, you’re the only one I can ever imagine sharing the top of the world with.” He looked sideways at me, as he stopped, poised between backing up and being on our way. “What I must tell you, my love, is that if I ever really reach the top of the world, I want you by my side.”

I smiled at him. He deserved it. The man said such romantic things. I still wasn’t sure about moving in with him, though. It would take more than a honeyed tongue, I thought.

We pulled into the driveway and Cas carried E into the house. Which would have worked just fine if, as I opened the door, we hadn’t found Pythagoras cowering against it, surrounded by rats. Two rats and Pythagoras tried to make a break through the open door, and I’m not exactly sure how, but I ended up holding two very irate baby rats by the tails, and a cat by the ear at the same time I shut the door using the back of my knee and my butt.

“Step carefully,” I told Cas. “The rats are all over.”

“You know this sounds like a line from a horror movie,” he said, but tiptoed carefully through the rats darting madly around to put E in the bed. Then he came back and looked at Pythagoras whom I’d let go, with plain and open amusement. “Some ratter Pythagoras has turned out to be,” he said.

“Well, it’s a good thing. If we’d come back to rat remains, Ben would probably be very upset. He’s gotten attached to them.” As I spoke, I was collecting the rats and—lacking any other container—shoving them into the pockets of my coat. “Go get the aquarium,” I said.

He tiptoed to the kitchen and yelled back, “The aquarium is on the floor in pieces. And there’s a rat wobbling around amid the mess. He seems concussed.”

But I’d kept track of the initials on the butts of the rats I’d picked up, so I could say confidently. “No, that’s Rat Face. He always looks concussed. I don’t think he’s very bright. Maybe Ben fed him at the wrong end a couple of times in the middle of the night, or something.”

“Creepy that you know which one it is,” he shouted back.

“Nah, they’re marked.” I was holding the rats in my pockets with my hands and expecting E to wake and come running into the living room at any minute and try to help. “Just grab the big stock pot from the third cabinet to the right, would you?”

“Uh . . . Stock pot. There it is.”

“Yeah,” I said, as he brought it into the room. It was a huge pot, bought by Ben at a restaurant supply because—he tried to convince me—I could make stock from stuff like discounted turkeys around Thanksgiving, and at least inject some protein into mine and E’s diet. “It has straight sides to keep them in. And I never use it for stock.”

I dropped the rats in it, and we put some kitchen towels around them for warmth, though frankly now that they had fur they probably didn’t need it. Then we sat the pot on the table and cleaned up the mess on the floor.

“I wonder if Pythagoras tried to jump on the counter,” Cas said. “And caused the aquarium to fall.”

“Impossible. We left him locked in the bathroom.”

“Sometimes cats learn to open doors.”

“Maybe,” I said. But I had something else worrying at me. “But Pythagoras doesn’t seem all that capable of guile, and learning.” I frowned. “I wonder if it was someone with my stolen key.”

As I spoke, Cas was squatting on the floor, patiently sweeping fragments of aquarium into the dustpan. He froze, dead still. “Your what?”

“My key was missing,” I said. “When I came home from the tea.”

“I’m still at a loss why you went to the tea in the first place. I know you delight in vexing your ex, but all the same, it seems like too much effort to that end.”

“Well, yes. I wanted to meet the Martins. I still think they might be politically connected enough to have caused your boss to upbraid you.”

“Oh, you’re probably right there,” he said, resuming sweeping but in the slow, careful way that implied he could sweep me away too if I insisted on being weird. “But the thing is, why would you want to make these people feel upset or watched? If they’re connected enough to get the chief to try to stop you from meddling with an old case, then they’re connected enough to do things even more unpleasant indeed.”

“Maybe,” I said. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“You also didn’t think to tell me you’d lost your key,” he said. “And why would Colm leave you alone in the house when you didn’t know if someone might come in? I mean, I know he’s infatuated, but—”

“Oh, he didn’t want to, but I should point out I don’t know that my key was stolen. I might have had it in my pocket and accidentally dropped it while getting a tissue or something.”

“Um,” he said. “Have you lost a key that way before?”

“No. I don’t think I’ve lost a key since high school. I used to lose them very often then, but not since.”

“Um. Look, Dyce, I don’t like it. I’m not saying someone broke into your house. It’s entirely possible no one did, and the aquarium just fell somehow. As slow as Pythagoras seems, he might have learned to get out of the bathroom, or the door might not have been closed as well as you think it was. All these door handles are rusty. It’s a wonder this hasn’t happened before. But all the same . . . Do you mind if we look around and see if anything is missing?”

We couldn’t find anything missing in the house. Which, admittedly, isn’t saying much. I once had a dream where someone broke into my house and felt so sorry about what he found that he’d given me money in the end and offered to steal furniture for me.

The most expensive thing in my house was the kitchen table and the matching chairs that Ben and Cas had provided. But people rarely take antique oak tables and matching chairs to be fenced. It’s not exactly easily portable merchandise.

The appliances were only a fridge and a stove, both the property of the rental company who had outfitted the house.